I’m excited about the new class offered this fall at The Bethlehem Institute, “Tracing God’s Ways: The Story of Salvation History.”
The plan is to unfold the economy of God’s salvation moving diachronically through the pages of Holy Scripture. The class is Sept. 19-Dec 12, Sundays 10:30AM – 12:30PM. If you interested and live around the Twin Cities then we’d love for you to join us. Register here.
Here’s a shot of the Table of Contents.
Alongside these editorial and compositional factors, moreover, are important hermeneutical signals that must be studied and assessed for their proper proportionality and significance. The juxtaposing of late and early is not just a matter of the clever matching of kindred themes or catchwords or the tidying up of historical gaps and inconsistencies after the fact.
He we approach the heart of canonical reading, that is, that aspect of God’s word to Israel that continues to press for a hearing and addresses new generations with an old word, borne of a specific time and specific application and, without shedding that, moving forward through time to enclose new readers and new situations.
Christopher Seitz, Prophecy and Hermeneutics, 239, paragraphing and italics mine
Seitz makes a very important point about the canonical approach that I think distinguishes it from hard historical-grammatical approaches and fluffy reader-response orientations.
A canonical reading continues to press for a hearing and addresses new generations with an old word. In order for the old word to apply to us we do not need to vicariously inhabit the world of pre-exilic Israel awaiting an impending judgment, nor a Second Temple Judaism that may have some serious issues with ethnocentrism. This old word continues to press for a hearing right now where we’re at in the economy of salvation.
And it is, in fact, an old word. This is to say that it does have a determinant meaning. The author did mean something. The text does mean something. Our task is not creative, but exegetical. And the conviction that drives our exegesis situates “exegesis” within a larger framework of God’s revelation. Exegesis cannot be the mere decoding of texts shrouded by centuries of historical and cultural differences. Exegesis is the turning of our ears toward an old word that continues to press for a hearing.
I had this thought just upon the brink of a 20 minute nap leading to a 5+ hour smorgasbord of memorizing Hebrew paradigms. I had not seen Melissa for most of the day between class and work. I was missing her. And that’s when the thought–a sketch of some alternative reality–waved to me from a distance. What if Melissa and I didn’t know one another and we had recently met for the first time?
We’re for sure to be married in this alternative reality but our paths do not cross until Jonathan and Melissa meet in their mid-twenties. Interesting. So I imagined us with all of the same friends we have now: at parties, sitting around a fire, laughing, talking, etc. And that’s when it occurred to me how absolutely in love I would be for that girl.
I pictured her talking and carrying on with her friends and I was captivated by her beauty. I would be nervous to talk to her. I would be really excited when our conversations went well. And I’d be devastated when I felt like I said something stupid in front of her.
This may be an alternative reality where we are not yet married, but I cannot conceive of a reality in which her and I would be disconnected. That kind of thought is impossible for me. Our relation to one another is such that I cannot imagine a world without her. That world does not exist and I cannot even contemplate the fact of its nonexistence.
I think this means that I love her very much. It was a significant moment for me where I think I understood more of what it means to be a husband–to be her husband. Dear God, thank you that I am her husband. And that she is my wife.
Melissa, I love you.
Seitz offers three reasons for why Hosea is the first of the Minor Prophets although it does not rank first chronologically.
Christopher Seitz, Prophecy and Hermeneutics, numbering mine
My more contentious point is that those who claim that their reading is more historically appropriate–a reading in which the individual prophets are isolated from one another, recast according to date, and placed in a reconstructed temporal context–are actually the ones who are not reading the prophets sufficiently historically, for final canonical form is also a piece of history, belonging to decisions made in the past about how an ancient prophetic witness is finally to be heard.
Christopher Seitz, Prophecy and Hermeneutics, 233
Seitz begins in Lindbeck categories by highlighting the “experiential-expressive” readings that characterizes some historical-critical approaches. In this case it is George Adam Smith and his commentary on the Minor Prophets in the early 20th century. Smith is an easy example of theologians who really sought to get behind the text and live in the world of the biblical author. Such an approach ignores the canon and attempts to breathe in the “clear desert air” that the prophets themselves inhabited before what they said became “writings collected in a sacred book” (think Jowett).
Seitz notes,
“By focusing on historical retrieval of an author and his intentions, it is possible to lay bare a dimension of the Old Testament that, in spite of its rhetorical potential, cannot be reattached to the way the New hears the Old” (228).
In other words, you can do that if you want to but that’s not the way the apostles read the Hebrew Scriptures.
Seitz hopes to give us a fresh look at the Book of the Twelve. He writes,
My hope in so doing is to show that the turn from man to text, from recovered individual personality to the collective witness of the final-form presentation of the Twelve as a whole, need not rob the exposition of its rhetorical power nor its existential engagement with new generations of readers (230).
In other words, you don’t have to psycho-analyze the biblical authors in order to make their message “preach.” Preach the prophets as Holy Scripture.
Chapter eight of Christopher Seitz’s Prophecy and Hermeneutics: Toward a New Introduction to the Prophets is “worth the price of the entire book” (but my copy is used). The chapter is entitled “Prophecy and Hermeneutics: Canonical Reading and Hermeneutical Reflections.” Due to how the chapter is so concise, clear, and helpful, I plan to devote the next series of posts to insightful portions from Seitz.
He begins the chapter with quotes from Benjamin Jowett and Hermann Gunkel.
Jowett is quoted: “The true use of interpretation is to get rid of interpretation, and leave us alone in company with the author.”
Gunkel says, “If the contemporary readers wish to understand the prophets, they must entirely forget that the writings were collected in a sacred book centuries after the prophet’s work. The contemporary reader must not read their words as portions of the Bible but must attempt to place them in the context of the life of the people of Israel in which they were first spoken.”
Seitz then writes,
In these quotations we see a separation of text and author and a valorizing of man over text. In this chapter I want to reverse that trend (221).
